Conciseness of first-order formulae

Abstract A word w is concise in a class of groups $$\mathcal {C}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>C</mml:mi> </mml:math> if, for every group G in $$\mathcal {C}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>C</mml:mi> </mml:math> , the verbal subgroup w ( G ) is finite whenever w takes only finitely many values in G . This notion can be naturally extended to first-order formulae in the language of groups. We consider this more general setting and establish conciseness for various classes of groups and formulae. We prove that all formulae are concise in the class of abelian groups and that every existential formula is concise in the class of torsion-free class-2 nilpotent groups. In addition, we construct new examples of weakly rational words, which allow us to produce a wide variety of formulae that are concise in the class of residually finite groups.